Josh Marshall reminds us that tonight's primary in Mississippi is the last contest before Pennsylvania -- that's six full weeks of the Clinton and Obama campaigns duking it out rhetorically and through surrogates to gain advantage. And for what? To compete in yet another contest where delegates are awarded proportionately, allowing Obama to maintain his pledged delegate lead and Hillary to catch up by a few points, at best?
We've known for weeks now that Barack Obama essentially has an arithmetically-guaranteed lock on the pledged delegate lead, which fueled post-Super Tuesday talk that the superdelegates would have to step in to break a tie -- perhaps even to vote against the candidate with the popular vote lead. I've long considered the latter scenario rather implausible; even though the superdelegates can vote for whomever they like, what advantage would they see in doing so?
Mark Schmitt notes below that even with Florida and Michigan in the equation, it still remains virtually impossible for Hillary Clinton to catch up to Obama. What this tells me is that neither candidate will be able to reach the "magic number" on pledged delegates alone so what we're looking at is not a question of who the supers will side with but when. I'm going to assume that they know as well as I the mathematics of the race. So why wait to endorse? Between now and April 22 the following things are going to occur: Clinton will attempt to swing the supers to her side while simultaneously leveraging the unresolved Florida and Michigan contests to her advantage. Obama will continue wooing superdelegates and attracting caucus delegates to his side. These will produce marginal gains for each candidate but won't significantly change one fact: neither candidate will reach the magic number and then, as now, the decision is going to come down on the members of the Democratic Party establishment who, despite being "unelected," "undemocratic" or "unaccountable," will be precisely fulfilling the role they were designed for, which is resolving the contest.
Except that they are currently resolving nothing. They are waiting. Waiting, it seems, to confirm what is already patently obvious: this contest is not going to resolve itself through the democratic process (exactly what sort of delegate lead does a candidate need to in order to be "convincingly" in the lead?). If the Democratic Party wants to win the White House in November, then the party needs to make a call on this contest and get down to the business of beating John McCain. Everything until then is tired political theater.
--Mori Dinauer
